Jennifer Harbury

Jennifer Harbury is an attorney and human rights advocate who has documented, exposed, and spoken publicly about human rights abuses including those supported by the United States. She has spent the last twenty years working for human rights reforms both in Guatemala and in the United States. Her current work focuses on the long term history and legal consequences of U.S. torture practices from Vietnam to Guatemala to Abu Ghraib.

Ms. Harbury’s husband, Mayan resistance leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was captured alive by the Guatemalan military on March 12, 1992. He was secretly detained and tortured, and eventually executed without trial. Ms. Harbury’s efforts to save his life, including three dangerous hunger strikes, resulted in startling official disclosures in 1995 about the CIA’s use of known torturers as paid informants. Since that time, Ms. Harbury has pressed her case through a successful international trial at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights of the OAS, and continues to litigate claims against the CIA in the U.S. federal court system.

Ms. Harbury has continued to investigate and document CIA involvement in torture in Latin America as well as the Middle East. Her book, Truth, Torture and the American Way (2005), analyzes the historic, legal and policy questions raised by current U.S. torture practices.

Ms. Harbury holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.